The Vietnamese government is planning to cut at least 10% of civil service jobs in the next four years in an effort to curtail public spending.
A new resolution by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) has set a target of cutting some 400,000 government jobs by 2021, according to VnExpress. At the moment, the state budget is paying for four millions jobs, ranging from public school teachers and medical professionals to civil servants, not including the military.
Local authorities have been asked to monitor the efficiency of their agencies and to ensure that roles do not overlap, in an effort to see where excess funding is being spent.
Communes around the country that are found to employ a disproportionate number of employees based on their size and population will be merged. Current regulations dictate that a commune must span at least 30 square kilometers and have at least 5,000 citizens; at the moment there are 724 communes that don't satisfy the two criteria.
Nguyen Duc Ha, a member of the team charged with drafting the recent resolution, told VnExpress: “Merging hundreds of communes could help save trillions of dong.”
Presently Vietnam employs in excess of 700,000 civil servants, whose total salaries cost VND17 trillion (USD$760 million) per year, according to Vice Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Social Affairs Bui Sy Loi.
The new resolution is part of an ongoing trend of civil service job cuts in Vietnam. In the first half of 2016, about 10,000 civil servant jobs were eliminated in an effort to balance the budget. These job cuts fell short of the original target of 40,000, which would have been 1.5 of the payroll at that time, as reported by VnExpress.
According to economist Tran Xuan Cau, cutting the number of state payroll employees by a third will save the government up to VND100 trillion (USD$4.4 billion).
[Photo via Bao Moi]
